Contact Information

Educational Background

A.B., Brown University, 2000

M.A., University of Pennsylvania, 2003

Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 2008

Liliana Milkova’s scholarly expertise is in modern and contemporary art and photography with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe. Prior to joining the Allen Memorial Art Museum (AMAM), she held a postdoctoral position in the Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., as well as fellowships at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. At Oberlin, as liaison between the AMAM and the faculty, she is responsible for the museum’s outreach across the curriculum and for developing new pedagogic strategies for teaching with original artworks in non-art disciplines. She spearheaded and authored the publication of the first academic museum brochure, which analyzes the application of art as a cross-disciplinary teaching tool. She has also co-authored with Oberlin College professors in the History and Biology departments three articles on teaching with art in the context of higher education.

At the AMAM, she has co-curated two exhibitions, A Museum for Oberlin, which chronicles the history and development of the museum’s extensive, encyclopedic holdings, and Italy on Paper, which explores the ways in which Venice, Rome, and Florence were framed as travel destinations and tourist attractions in the 19th and early-20th centuries. Liliana is the sole curator of two other exhibitions at the AMAM: Illuminating Faith in the Russian Old Believer Tradition and The Legacy of Socialist Realism. She has also curated exhibitions and published essays on Soviet political propaganda from the Cold War (for example, "Soviet Science") and contemporary art from Eastern Europe, and contributed to catalogs published by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and the Morgan Museum & Library, New York. She is currently completing a research project on American comic artist R. Crumb’s 1965 sketchbook report from his travels behind the Iron Curtain.